#BTColumn – Employment pressures

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY. 

by Dennis DePeiza

The turmoil that is being experienced in the creation, securing and maintaining of employment, is now part of the transitioning of the world in which we live.

The economic crisis and more so the onset of COVID 19, have carried the blame for the myriad changes that have come about.

The fundamental challenge which faces governments, the business community and the labour movement, is that of finding workable solutions to the unemployment woes. While this is a work in progress, it would seem that the three main actors are finding it extremely difficult to find the much-anticipated solutions.

For what it is worth, the thinking of governments and the business community is to work towards the reduction of operational expenditure.

In working to achieve this, the strategy seems to be directed at the reduction in the number of persons to be employed, imposing cuts in wages and salaries, scaling down the range of benefits offered to workers and introducing technologies in the workplace on a large scale, and as substitute for labour.   

It is believed that these approaches are more than likely welcomed by big busi-ness. Evidently, the shift helps them to reduce expenditures and to maintain their profit margins. For small businesses, these are challenged to maintain their viabil-ity within a highly competitive market.

As the pressures mounts, many of these small businesses face pending collapse. It is difficult to understand the intention of the policy where attention is directed at promoting entrepreneurship and the de-velopment of a third sector, when at the same time, these emerging businesses are placed under immense pressure to survive.

There can be no doubt that intro-duction and maintaining of new technologies come at a significant cost.

Establish-ing a clientele and the facing of stiff competition in a market of free enterprise, can have implications for the growth and development of an enterprise. Out of this comes the uncertainty of maintaining employment. There are also implications for the quality of jobs on offer.

In both large and small economies, it is known that businesses are profit driven. The shifting from the traditional mode where persons work in an office setting to that of home working, cannot be in all instances considered to be a productive ex-perience.

Based on the nature of the job, this arrangement could prove not to be cost beneficial. This could be the source of a headache for employers who are chal-lenged to ensure that worker productivity is maintained, and at the expected level.

It cannot be disregarded that given the need to get the best out of workers, it may be necessary to incentivise them in an effort to meet the levels of productivity and to maintain performance standards.       

Employers may have considered that they won the battle, but from a labour standpoint, they may not have won the war.

Employers in their quest to transform the working environment, may have done themselves a disservice in having em-barked on a move to drive workers away from the traditional workplace.

The loss of control over their employees cannot be easily dismissed by employers as being insignificant. In a market place where there is a demand for employees with skills, talents and expertise, and where employers seem to think that they can buy these services at will, it would appear that they are forgetting that the global competi-tion can place workers in a better negotiating position.

The once undervaluing of labour in the traditional hiring and recruitment arrange-ment, now stands to be exposed and exploited.

The idea of having fixed wages and salaries and the general conditions of employment, stand to be challenged by contract workers.

Contract workers are now in a position to demand the salary and benefits which they require. As employers search out for the brightest and best employees, they put themselves in a position where they have to pay for what they want.

While this approach of offering individual contracts to employees hold significant implications for the collective bargaining process, it opens the door for workers at the individual level to be able to bargain for better pay and conditions of work.

The beauty of this development is that once the standards are set and known, it means that a benchmark is established that workers can exploit.

Where it may have initially appeared that those who move to be engaged on con-tracts have done an injustice to the process of collective bargaining, their action may have given trade unions the opportunity to solidify and strengthen a new col-lective bargaining approach.

Dennis DePeiza is a labour & employee relations consultant, Regional Management Services Inc. Visit our Website: www.regionalmanagement services.com